Just how hungry are we all for another remake of Scarface? I have to say I’m pretty happy with the ones we’ve already got, but that won’t stop Universal from remaking it again. They’ve been trying for most of this decade, churning through directors of the reboot persuasion such as Antoine Fuqua of The Equalizer and The Magnificent Seven, and top-table screenwriters of a gangsterish inclination like Paul Attanasio, Terence Winter and the Coen brothers. But now it looks as if they might be getting somewhere, thanks to news that the studio is currently in talks with Training Day scribe and Suicide Squad director David Ayer.

From Gladiator to Scarface: five film heroes to bring back from the dead

Read more

So how to modernise things? Will we just see another immigrant group grossly misrepresented in terms of tacky nouveau-riche glitz, an innate facility for criminality and hair-trigger psychosis? To quote Scarface’s censor-imposed subtitle, “The Shame of a Nation” tends to come from whatever ethnic group currently has the least friends in the US – Italians in 1932, Mariel Cubans in 1983 – which tends to suggest that the next Scarface will rise from the Mexican cartels or the Russian mafia.

Call me old-fashioned but I like the Howard Hughes-Howard Hawks-Ben Hecht original, which arrived in cinemas one month before its inspirational gang-lord, Al Capone, heard the gates of Alcatraz slam shut behind him. It was written and shot on the still-hot lava of the molten events it depicted, hence its immediacy and vigour. Hawks and Hecht constructed a violent black comedy about the immigrant experience and the American dream, packed the movie with spectacular murders and allusions to incest and the Borgias. They were backed up by the big money and big mouth of never-say-die producer Hughes, a combatant in the movie’s endless skirmishes with the pre-Hays Code censors.

That was a feature of the remake, too. The original had used a visual motif of Xs whenever a character got murdered. Second time around, however, X was just the rating the MPAA wanted to slap on it, with likely ruinous effects on De Palma’s box office. You can see their problem. It was an excessive movie, in script, direction and in Pacino’s performance. It was also grindingly crude, foul-mouthed and down-market, with instantly dated stylings and tiresome homages. Martin Amis was right: its primary audience is spotty film geeks and visionary crack dealers.

So, if there is a single good reason to remake Scarface, it would be to redeem the 1932 version from the 1983. Oh, and Michael Shannon for Capone.